THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
549
gets done in between. Of course one cannot have enlightenment
without "enlightenment-mongering," it is a by-product of the process.
In the intensive, honest, and responsible movement toward truth,
there is constantly a mixture of hybris, to which the serpent sought
to beguile man; but neither is it possible wholly to avoid the scnse
of barrenness which arises when anyone regards the business of
enlightenment as done, and the world, or at least himself, as eluci–
dated. This too must not be understood abstractly: we exist in a com–
munity consciousness, we
did
begin a definite undertaking toward
enlightenment two and a half millennia ago (or several million years
ago; or two and a half centuries ago-according to whether we
begin it with Socrates, or with Adam, or with some Frenchman
between Descartes and Rousseau) ; we have traversed the whole road
with the pendulum swinging back and forth many times-between
reason and feeling, between optimism and skepticism, between the
individual and the collectivity, between progress and tradition, be–
tween utopia and taboo. Hence the question of right or wrong en–
lightenment cannot be put abstractly.
It
has to be put to ourselves in
the year 1952, as a question which, for its answer, demands a de–
CISIOn.
Weare involved to the highest degree. We live in great anx–
iety-and precisely because of enlightenment, of a light too harsh.
There is more than enough to make us shudder-what with the
artificial brains which solve our mathematical problems more re–
liably and incomparably more quickly than we can ourselves, what
with the pitilessly probing start of psychoanalysis, what with the
power-prospects of the super-rationalists.
It
is as if the
daemonium
meridionale
had acquired power over us, the demon of noonday,
the spirit whose lurking place is the harshest light.
But there can and must be no going back. The harm which en–
lightenment threatens to do, or has done, can only be overcome by
more enlightenment. Hiding in a cave is no salvation from the
demon of noonday. The taboos stripped of their magic will not re–
gain their power-if for no other reason, because they remain un–
touched while people play with ideologies which do not conjure up
those powers but merely cite them. No romanticism, no irrationalism,
no provincialism can save us, no retreat into any idyls or institutions
of the past. There is no way back to the childhood of humanity,
